China signed an agreement with the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) to provide $2.35 million to support to the Gaza food program for 2018.

According to Chinesenews outlet Xinhua, the agreement was signed by Guo Wei, the director of the Office of the People's Republic of China to the State of Palestine, and Pierre Krahenbuhl, the UNRWA commissioner general.

UNRWA called the agreement a generous support from the Chinese government amid the agency's financial crisis after the United States cut its aid funds by over a half.

Krahenbuhl said in a statement that China has given "great attention to the issue of Palestine and has always shown attention and solidarity for Palestine refugees throughout the region."

Guo restated China's steady position in supporting Palestinians through various channels, and declared that "China would like to announce a grant of 100 million yuan ($14.64 million) in helping the economy development and improving living conditions of Palestinians."

The agreement also states that China will provide emergency humanitarian assistance to Palestinians and make further contributions to the UNRWA.

China has previously urged the international community to help UNRWA during its financial crisis, in order to uphold its obligations towards millions of refugees who rely on the UNRWA services, particularly in the besieged Gaza Strip, where the humanitarian crisis deepens on the daily.

The US aid cut came after a decision made following a lengthy internal debate within the Donald Trump administration.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, pushed for a complete freeze of funding to UNRWA, unless the Palestinians commit to U.S.-mediated peace talks with Israel, while Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other State Department officials warned that such a move would create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Jordan and the occupied West Bank.

UNRWA recently announced that it succeeded in reducing its deficit from $446 million to $217 million, in order to maintain its work throughout 2018, but warned against cutting its services due to the drastic deficit.

UNRWA provides cash assistance to more than 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria -- one of the largest such programs in an active conflict setting anywhere in the world. UNRWA also provides education to over 47,000 Palestinian refugees in the war-torn country.

In Gaza, where unemployment is among the highest in the world due to a decade-long Israeli siege on the coastal enclave, almost one million Palestinian refugees are dependent on UNRWA for emergency food assistance -- ten times the amount of refugees that required such support in 2000.

Throughout the region, the agency serves about 5.3 million Palestinian refugees.

The government of Germany announced, on Wednesday, a contribution of an additional support of €8.4 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) food program in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The German representative Office in Ramallah said in a statement that the €8.4 million contribution was provided to UNRWA's food program in Gaza.

The newly added contribution increases Germany's total of funds for the food program to €16 million for 2018.

Bernd Kuebart, German Representative in Ramallah, said in a statement that "the funds will help meet the urgent humanitarian needs of Palestine Refugees in Gaza who are dependent on UNRWA's support."

Jared Kushner, US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, has quietly been trying to shut down UNRWA, which has provided food and essential services for millions of Palestinian refugees for decades, according to internal emails obtained by Foreign Policy.

Foreign policy said, according to both American and Palestinian officials, that Kushner’s “initiative is part of a broader push by the Trump administration and its allies in Congress to strip these Palestinians of their refugee status in the region and take their issue off the table in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.”

“By trying to unwind UNRWA, the Trump administration appears ready to reset the terms of the Palestinian refugee issue in Israel’s favor—as it did on another key issue in December, when Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital,” the magazine added on its website.

Kushner, whom Trump has delegated to reach a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has been reluctant to speak publicly about any aspect of his Middle East diplomacy.

But his position on the refugee issue and his animus toward UNRWA are evident in internal emails written by Kushner and others earlier this year.

“It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA,” Kushner wrote about the agency in one of those emails, dated January 11 and addressed to several other senior officials, including Trump’s Middle East peace envoy, Jason Greenblatt.

“This [agency] perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace,” he wrote.

In the same January email, Kushner wrote: “Our goal can’t be to keep things stable and as they are. … Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things in order to get there.”

Kushner raised the refugee issue with officials in Jordan during a visit to the region in June, along with special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt.

According to Palestinian officials, he pressured the Jordanian leadership to strip its more than 2,000,000 registered Palestinians of their refugee status so that UNRWA would no longer need to operate there.

“[Kushner said] the resettlement has to take place in the host countries and these governments can do the job that UNRWA was doing,” according to Hanan Ashrawi, a member of Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

She said the Trump administration wanted rich Arab Gulf states to cover the costs Jordan might incur in the process.

“They want to take a really irresponsible, dangerous decision and the whole region will suffer,” Ashrawi said.

Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, told reporters in June that Kushner’s delegation had said it was ready to stop funding UNRWA altogether and instead channel the money, $300 million annually, to Jordan and other countries that host Palestinian refugees.

“All this is actually aimed at liquidating the issue of the Palestinian refugees,” he said.

The White House declined to comment on the information published by Foreign Policy, which quoted a senior executive branch official as saying, on condition of anonymity, that US policy regarding the UN’s Palestinian refugee program “has been under frequent evaluation and internal discussion. The administration will announce its policy in due course.”

Jordanian officials in New York and Washington did not respond to the magazine’s queries about Kushner’s positions in this regard.

Kushner and Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, both proposed ending funding for the UNRWA back in January. But the State Department, the Pentagon, and the US intelligence community all opposed the idea, fearing in part that it could fuel violence in the region.

The following week, the State Department announced that that US would cut the first $125 million installment of its annual payment to UNRWA by more than half, to $60 million.

“UNRWA has been threatening us for six months that if they don’t get a check they will close schools. Nothing has happened,” Kushner wrote in the same email.

Foreign Policy said there was another email sent by Victoria Coates, a senior advisor to Greenblatt, to the White House’s national security staff indicating that the White House was mulling a way to eliminate UNRWA.

“UNRWA should come up with a plan to unwind itself and become part of the UNHCR [UN High Commissioner for Refugees] by the time its charter comes up again in 2019,” Coates wrote.

Several US senators are attempting to pass into law a new bill introduced in the Congress that recognizes only 40,000 Palestinian refugees instead of 5.3 million refugees.

The newly introduced bill would ensure that the funds contributed to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) would go towards the resettlement of Palestinians displaced in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), and not their descendants – who are a total number of 5.3 million people.

The bill was initiated by Republican Congressman, Doug Lamborn, who entitled it as "The UNRWA Reform and Refugee Support Act."

Lamborn said in a statement that the "refugee status is not something that can be handed down from generation to generation," referring to the descendants of Palestinian refugees who were born and are living in other countries.

The bill was allegedly introduced to differentiate between the original Palestinian refugees, who have the right to return after being displaced from their homes, from their descendants.

Lamborn demanded that UNRWA "figures out the actual number of true Palestinian refugees", claiming that the total is not correct.

“Palestinians in Gaza are not refugees; they are a population suffering under the Hamas terror regime, whose leaders take aid money and instead of building schools and hospitals, build terror tunnels and send rockets hidden under UNRWA schools in Gaza into kindergartens in Israel," the US congressman further alleged.

According to the UNRWA’s Staff Union, the Agency has closed its mental health programme, which was providing direct services to Palestinian refugees and employing about 430 staff.

UNRWA has also terminated the contracts of dozens of its engineers in recent months, the union officials said earlier.

The union stated that the UNRWA’s decision to sack its employees is an initial step to dismiss a thousand employees of the emergency programmes by the end of 2018, adding that next year will witness a new wave of dismissals, under the pretext of a budget deficit.

Established in 1949, UNRWA provides critical aid to Palestinian refugees displaced since 1948, and who are now living in the blockaded Gaza Strip, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

Earlier this year, the US suspended over half of the annual funding — $65 million out of $125 million — earmarked for the refugee agency.

Earlier on Wednesday, UNRWA Christopher Gunness issued the following statement, with regard to the crisis:

The complex and harsh challenges the Palestine refugee community has endured over the past decades are monumental. This year the challenges have grown, following the largest ever reduction in funding UNRWA has faced. The ability of Palestine refugees to persevere is hugely admired by many around the world who continue earnestly to express solidarity and support for them. As we continue to pursue every avenue of support to overcome a severe financial crisis, UNRWA, its dedicated staff, and the refugees have only one option – to face up to this situation together and preserve the most important work we do.

The decision of the US to cut $300 million in funding to UNRWA this year has been described by our Commissioner-General as an existential threat to UNRWA. Determined not to forsake Palestine refugees, UNRWA and its partners have mobilized political and financial support around the globe, to maintain its operations and render essential services to its beneficiaries with dignity and hope.

Our global fundraising efforts and Dignity Is Priceless campaign have led to significant additional support for UNRWA, from historical donors to new partners, including institutions for the mobilization of Zakat. Throughout this period, the Hosts provided important backing. From March to June alone UNRWA raised US$ 238 million in new funding for Palestine refugees, and with the conclusion of the New York pledging conference on 25 June, the US$ 446 deficit was reduced to US$ 217 million – a monumental achievement.

The response, so far, reaffirms that UNRWA enjoys clear support from key donors, hosts and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Continuing and expanding this support is crucial for our efforts over the coming months to bridge the financial gap and ensure needed funding for our 2019 operations.We are still in crisis. Let no one claim otherwise. But we are also determined to maintain core services to the millions of Palestine refugees who rely on us in Jordan, Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territory, and Syria, and preserve what we can of our emergency assistance.

Our emergency assistance is critically under-funded in the occupied Palestinian territory, where the US contribution for emergency programming — almost $100 million per year — is no longer available and has forced us to take mitigating measures.

In implementing these changes to its emergency interventions in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, UNRWA’s humanitarian responsibility dictates that we give priority to refugees with the most critical needs. It dictates that we protect core services, including education, health and relief, via our staff members to the millions of Palestine refugees in need of such services. With the rolling out of these measures, a limited number of personnel (both area and international) will be affected.

In the West Bank owing to the absence of emergency funding, UNRWA will discontinue its Cash for Work activities effective 31 July 2018. However, households assessed in the last two years as abject poor, will be transitioned to theSocial Safety Net Programme (SSNP) – a core programme of the Agency, which we are determined to continue. This will ensure that the most impoverished refugees inside camps continue to receive assistance, and become eligible for other forms of support which are not available under Cash for Work. Food voucher activities will continue until the end of 2018, at which time households who have been assessed in the last two years as abject poor will also be transitioned to SSNP.

The Bedouin community’s food assistance programme will continue operating until the end of 2018, with UNRWA and its partner the World Food Programme actively working to secure funds for its continuation in 2019. The Community Mental Health Programme (CMHP) will be discontinued effective 31 August 2018. UNRWA is currently coordinating options to continue working with select communities alongside UN agencies. Finally, mobile health clinics will be discontinued effective 31 October 2018. UNRWA is identifying possible partners for continued service to select communities.

As a result of all these measures, 154 staff members hired against now depleted emergency funds will not have their contracts renewed upon reaching their expiry date. UNRWA recognizes the implications of such measures on affected staff. In recognition to the important service of these colleagues and their dedication, if they chose to apply in the future to vacant posts, they will be treated as ‘internal candidates’ allowing an exceptional greater opportunity for re-employment with the Agency.

In doing all it can to minimize the impact on refugees in Gaza UNRWA is prioritizing food security support to the most vulnerable refugees by continuing its emergency food programme to nearly I1 million refugees and retaining certain interventions such as Cash for Work. In order to do so, the community mental health programme, job creation programme and protection functions will have to be altered. The community mental health programme will continue, albeit at reduced capacity and cost. As of September 2018, mental health activities will be largely embedded within our health and education departments instead of a standalone programme.

In order to protect as many jobs as possible and retain components of certain emergency-based interventions by integrating them into core programmes, around 280 staff will be redeployed on full time basis in existing or revised functions and approximately 584 staff will be offered part time posts in existing or revised functions. The EA funding challenge in the Strip would result in having113 posts on emergency funding not renewed upon expiry of contract in August this year. As is the case with the West Bank field, if they choose to apply in the future to vacant posts, they will be treated as ‘internal candidates’ allowing an exceptional greater opportunity for re-deployment with the Agency.

It is important to emphasize that relentless efforts are underway to ensure that the new school year would start on time, catering to half a million students, and that our other essential services – such as health care for example – continue uninterrupted. It is equally important to be clear that UNRWA remains committed to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees, in accordance with its mandate. The General Assembly has consistently extended the Agency’s mandate, most recently until 30 June 2020.

In his recent letter to UNRWA staff, the Commissioner-General said that despite all the challenges it faces, the Agency “will prevail” and it will not weaken its “defense of the rights and dignity of Palestine refugees.”